


I Don't Want to Forget

by Lynniethebeegirl



Category: Twilight (Movies), Twilight Series - All Media Types, Twilight Series - Stephenie Meyer
Genre: Alzheimer's Disease, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-02
Updated: 2019-03-27
Packaged: 2019-06-20 22:36:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15543645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lynniethebeegirl/pseuds/Lynniethebeegirl
Summary: After spending years caring for her mother suffering from early onset Alzheimer's disease, Bella moves to Forks to live with her father, and try to build a new life for herself. With the help of family and friends she heals and comes to terms with her mother's illness. She also begins a relationship with Alice Cullen, whose family may hold the key to Bella avoiding the same illness her mother has.





	1. One

“What’s this for?” I take the parka that Charlie hands me. Is it really that cold in Washington?

“There’s an early cold front coming through. Not that bad, but it’s going to feel pretty bitter after living in Arizona for eighteen years.” He rearranges his carry on with a raincoat on the top, where he can reach it.

“Thank you.” I mimic him, stuffing the parka into the top of my backpack. Earlier that day, after the ambulance had left with Mom, he’d taken me to the mall and told me to get some clothes to wear home. I’d gotten what I thought was cold weather clothing- jeans, a thin t-shirt, and a thin zip up hoodie. The parka made me realize that I had vastly underestimated what I was in for.

“I don’t think there’s a great place for a girl your age to go shopping in Forks, but when we go to Seattle in a few days to get your mother set up in her place you can pick up some more things. Once you know what the weather is like, and all that.”

“That would be great, thank you.” Besides my going home outfit, I just had a few shirts, pajama pants, and a pair of sneakers that were three sizes too big. All courtesy of Charlie’s trip to goodwill a few days ago. My smoke stained and singed pajamas I left home in had been disposed of by a nurse, which part of me resented, but the larger part of me knew was for the best.

“Have you gone online and looked at the place your mother is moving into? It looked nice.” I feel sick for a moment. My mother isn’t ‘moving’ she’s being put somewhere. In a home for people with early onset Alzheimer’s. Far away from me. I know there isn’t another option, but it still hurts. I couldn’t take care of her, and now she’s being taken away.

“No, not yet.” I look for ways to change the subject. “What’s Forks like?”

“It’s small. There’s a high school, classes start in a week. I still have a few days off, I figured we could go down there tomorrow and see about getting you enrolled. There’s a community college. It’s small, but it’s pretty good. A lot of students transfer to University of Washington in Seattle.” Will a high school take me? I haven’t been in school since I turned sixteen, and now I’m three days from being eighteen. Two years is a lot of time to make up.

“I thought we could go down to the DMV tomorrow and get you a learner’s permit. You can walk to a bunch of places from the house but having a drivers license will give you a lot more freedom. I know a guy that fixes up junked out cars, I could see about buying one off of him.”

It sounds like he has my whole life planned out for me. I think that’s something that I should dislike, but after years of calling the shots, I’m perfectly happy to let him make the decisions.

“When can we go see Mom?” I ask.

“We can go see her at the hospital when she gets in, the day after tomorrow. After that she might be there for a week or so, before she moves into her new place. I have to go back to work soon, but we’ll see if there’s a bus you could take to see her every week.”

“Okay.” I’ve lived a room away from her for eighteen years, including the last six months, where I haven’t been able to leave her in a room alone by herself. Once a week seems like nothing.

“Group E, now boarding, Group E, now boarding.”

“That’s us.” We scramble to our feet and board the plane.   
*****  
It’s not quite dark when the plane lands, but my window seat doesn’t offer the view of my new home that I’d hoped for. Instead the landing is obscured by rain and fog.

We get home late, and drive through the small town, lit by a few street lights. Charlie’s house is on a narrow road off of main street. It looks super small from the front, but when we go in, it seems bearable.

“I know it’s a mess, I’ll try to get it cleaned up. I left as soon as the hospital called me.”

It looks good, and coming from someone who spent the last few years of her life locked in her house with cleaning being one of her principle forms of entertainment, that was a compliment. The kitchen and a living room are downstairs on one side of the house, and a bathroom and what I assume is Charlie’s room is on the other side.

“The spare bedroom is upstairs, and another bathroom. I had a friend come over to clean it up a bit. I know the bed is set up, but if you need anything just ask.” 

The bedroom is small, tucked up in the peak of the house. The ceiling is sloped, and I can’t stand at the edges of the room. The bed lies across the end of the room, under the window. I set my bag on it and sit on the end. It’s an old, metal framed bed, and creaks when I move. 

The room is bare, but clean. Painted wood floor, white ceiling. There’s a closet at one end, with some hangers up in it, and a hanging organizer. I wonder if that was there before, or if the friend had put it there.

I unpack, tucking my socks and underwear into the organizer, and hanging up the rest of my things. I change into pajama pants but keep the parka on while I brush my teeth, and don’t take it off until I climb into bed.

I look up at the sky, the stars so vivid compared to the starts in Phoenix. I can see a glow on the horizon from Seattle. I’ll always know which way Mom is.


	2. Chapter 2

The next morning Charlie and I eat breakfast together while he works through two weeks worth of mail.

“I had your school records sent up here.” He passes them over to me. I don’t have to open them to know what’s in them. It looks like the record of someone bound for the state penitentiary. Bad grades starting in seventh, increasing tardiness, walking out early, class skipping, and truancy increasing until my sixteenth birthday, where I disappear from school with a 1.0 gpa.

I open it and hand it to him. He scans it.

“Was seventh grade when she started showing symptoms?”

“Yeah, about that time.” That’s when she stopped caring about my grades, and started getting lost on her way to work. She would call me and I would have to go find her and take her to work. That’s all the tardiness and skipping class. Thing just got worse after that.

“Have you been studying since you left school?”

“The library was across the street. I read a lot, and I learned some computer programming before our computer broke.” I probably haven’t done a math problem for a solid two years, if not three. 

We have a meeting at the high school at ten. The special education coordinator examines my records, and then regards me skeptically.

“You’ve missed a solid two years of school.”

“She was taking care of a sick family member.” Charlie says.

“Her grades before that are well below passing, with truancy levels high enough that she effectively has been out of school for four years.”

“We’re aware of that. We want to know what she needs to do to move forward.”

The lady peers at me over her glasses.

“With your previous education so spotty, you would essentially have to do high school over again, and we only allow students up to the age of twenty-one. I’m very doubtful that you would be able to graduate before then. A GED program would be better suited for you.”

“Oh.” I mumble. I hadn’t been exactly jumping for joy about going to high school, but it’s weird to realize that that ship has sailed. Another piece of my life that I’ll never have.

“She needs an education, you can’t just refuse to let her go to school!” Charlie is pretty pissed.

“A GED would be the best educational route for her. I’m sorry, but after a certain point there isn’t much we can do. I can recommend some programs…”

“We’ll be fine.” Charlie gets up and walks out, and I swipe a GED pamphlet off of a desk as I leave the office.

We go to the DMV across the street, and thankfully I get a permit fairly easily. Charlie had gotten as many forms of ID for me as he could, and between my school records, hospital bills, and a replacement of my birth certificate from the phoenix city hall I’ll be alright ID wise until I get my ID in the mail.

I sign up for a GED program at the community center down the road from Charlie’s place, and Charlie talks a friend of his into giving me a part time job at a gas station in town. It’s ten hours a week, which isn’t much, but I don’t exactly have much work experience. Most jobs available to high schoolers involve leaving the house for more that twenty minutes at a time, and Mom hasn’t been able to stay home by herself for years.

I get a debit card at the bank in town. I’d been using Mom’s to buy things for years, but this is the first time I’ve had my own. The lot that the burned shell of our house had stood on had been sold almost as soon as it had been put on the market. Most of the money had been sucked up by hospital bills, debt collecting agencies, and my mother’s Medicaid, but a small portion had been put in an account for me. 

“Don’t spend it all in one place, okay? If you need something, come to me first. You never know what’s around the corner, so save it as long as you can.”

“Okay.” The bank is our last stop, and I ask Charlie if I can walk home. I want to look around the town a bit.

There’s some small, touristy stores along main street. A general store. A drugstore. I go into the drugstore, and make a beeline for the photo station. The smartphone that I’d bought after our computer had broken a year and a half ago had miraculously survived the fire, and every day since I’d harbored a fear of losing it. It had a year and a half worth of photos of me and Mom. If I lost those photos they would be just memories, bound in my mind only.

I get every photo I have printed. Which is a lot. Some of them are me and Mom, some are of the house, or the view from the windows or back yard. Screenshots of emails and bills.

I also get a phone card, with minutes and data. Not much, because I don’t exactly have anyone to call, but my days of sitting with the curtains drawn, speaking to no one, are over. I’d been using the free wifi from the library across the street, but Charlie’s house was a little far from that.

Charlie probably has his own wifi. Of course he does. Why don’t I think of these things.

I leave with a newly working phone, and about five pounds worth of photos. I window shop a little bit one my way home. There’s some pretty houses, a library, the community center. I start class next week. Hopefully not as behind as I probably am.

When I get home I don’t see Charlie anywhere. I go up to my room and spread out the photos on my floor. I put them into stacks based on content. Photos of me and Mom, photos of the house, screenshots and photos of bills and other important things, and screenshots of unimportant things.

Midway through tossing a handful of memes onto the unimportant pile, a photo catches my eye. A librarian in NYC had emailed me a dozen photographs taken in 1924, in a mental institution where I believed my Great-Grandmother may have been born that year. I hadn’t seen anyone who could be my Great-Great-Grandmother or her child, but one of the photos had always stood out to me.

The woman in the photograph is a little older than me, but not by much. She’s tied to her bed with wide straps, and she’s struggling to pull her head away from a nurse who seems intent on strapping her head down. Her hair is short and dark, maybe black or very dark brown. Her eyes are what I notice most, wide, most likely a light color like blue or green, and staring straight into the camera. 

She was trapped, just like me for so many years. But we’re both free now, in one way or another.


	3. Chapter 3

Mom is better than she’s been in years. She’s on meds for Alzheimers, for psychosis, for anxiety. She’s relaxed, answering questions, I don’t think she recognizes Charlie but she fakes it reasonably well.

She isn’t the person I’ve lived with the past eighteen years.

That night Charlie and I sit down together and eat dinner, chinese food we picked up in Seattle.

“Did you eat a lot of Chinese food in Phoenix?” Charlie has started asking me about my life, before we ended up in the hospital, before we came here.

“Once in a while. The places near us didn’t deliver, so we’d only have it when Mom was good enough to go with me or stay home alone.”

“Oh.”

There are all these facts, secrets that my life had been governed by, that no one else knew about, that no one else could know about, or else they might try to take me away. And I know its fine now, and that that part of my life is over, but it still feels dangerous.  
**********************************

Between the time that I was unstrapped from the stretcher, and the time that Charlie showed up, several questions were posed.

Had my mother been neglecting me? Probably. Had I been neglecting my mother? She’d burned the house down, so probably. Should either of us be charged with endangerment or neglect?

Lying on my hospital bed, in a hospital gown, I’d finally worried about my mother enough that that part of my brain just shut down. Which left me to face my new life, with no house, no money, no underwear, and a possible felony. Is neglect a felony or a misdemeanor? Probably either, depending on severity.

Twenty-one hours later, a nurse had gotten me a six pack of underwear at Walmart, and Charlie had shown up, discussed many things with several people, and informed me that first of all he was my father, and second that no charges would be filed against my mother and I. So at this point the underwear and felony issues had been taken care of, but I had the new issue of having a father, which I was completely unprepared for.

*****************

On the way to my first GED class, I decided that the whole having a father thing was not as unreasonable as it had seemed when he’d materialized in the hospital. 

“So I have to go back to work today, I’m on until seven. You know the way to walk home, right? And if you get lost call me and I’ll come find you. If it’s still light at seven we can try some driving.”

Charlie leaves me at the front entrance to the community center with ten bucks for lunch money, and a granola bar. 

I don’t know what I expected to find in a GED class. Felons? People that dropped out of high school and then sold weed behind that high school? My view of the world in between the grade school parts of life and the bill paying parts of life is pretty narrow.

Most of the dozen people in the class are older, most of them men. They look tired, a bit run down, but not adorned with the piercings and skillet tattoos I’d briefly imagined.

“Hi. I’m Bella.” I sit down next to someone that I hope is young enough we can be friends, or sort of friends.

“Jacob, Jacob Black.” He smiles. “Your dad is Charlie Swan, right? My dad is friends with him.”

“Yeah. I moved up here to live with him.” I pull out my notebook and pencil case. Forks is definitely living up to small town stereotypes.

“Nice, big change though. Arizona to Washington.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

We get out of class at noon, and before I start walking home Jacob stops me.

“Hey, a bunch of us are going down to the beach this afternoon. Do you want to come?”

“Yeah, sure.” I look up at the damp sky. “I don’t have a swimsuit.”

“It’s okay. Mostly people just hang out around a fire. A few guys might go surfing.”

We get in his car, and I send a quick text to Charlie letting him know what I’m up to. Getting into a car with a stranger I met three hours ago is something I consider pretty crazy, but it feels good, the excitement of not knowing what comes next.

“What’s Arizona like?”

“Hot.” The last time I left the six block radius containing the grocery store, my house, and the library was on my sixteenth birthday when Mom signed me out of school. School was ten blocks away. Hot was just about all I knew about Arizona.

Jacob seemed to sense that the different climate zones I had lived in wasn’t going to make the best conversation.

“What do you think of the GED class?” Ugh. Even worse than weather.

“It’s okay. I’m a little bit lost I guess. I haven’t been in school for a while. My Mom’s been sick the past few years.”

“I can tutor you if you want. I had a 4.0 in high school.” A 4.0, and now he’s in a ged class? Seeing my confused look, Jacob continues. “My dad was in a car crash the April before I was supposed to graduate. Tire blew out, wet roads, he lost control. He was in a coma for six weeks, in the hospital for three months. I dropped everything to take care of him. As soon as he woke up he told me to go back to school, but by then there was no going back for some of my classes. The school said I could redo last semester, but I wanted to move on.”

Moving on. Is that what I’m doing? Moving on from what my life was? I spent so long trying to be at peace with that life, but now it’s behind me.

Jacob’s truck inches down a narrow track winding its way through the woods. Finally I see a light at the end of the road, and we roll onto a pebbly beach. A few dozen people are already here, most in jeans and sweatshirts, bundled up against the chilly air coming off the water. A few guys in wet suits are walking towards the water with surfboards.

“Hi Bella!” A few girls standing in a huddle by the fire wave too me. I wander over, and they open up the circle to let me in. “I’m Jessica, this is Mattie, Emmy, Jane, and Amelia.”

“Hi. I’m Bella. I just moved here.”

“Yeah, we know. From Arizona.”

“If you’re from Arizona why are you so pale?” Jessica asks.

“I don’t know, I guess that’s why they kicked me out.” They laugh, then Jane spots something behind me.

“Hey, check it out!”

Someone is jumping off the cliff, several someone’s actually. I panic for a moment but they bob to the surface of the water and swim to the beach.

“Deadman's rock. It’s safe to jump off at low tide, any other time there’s a rip current that’ll pull you out. Jumping off of it is kind of a rite of passage if you live around here.” I look back towards the rock. “But don’t worry, you don’t have to do it at all. It’s mostly just the guys that do.”

The ‘cliff’ isn’t really that high. Maybe fifteen feet, but probably closer to ten, and the beach is pretty close to the landing spot. But for that ten feet the people jumping look completely free.

“No, I want to do it.” 

“Really?” Jessica looks skeptical. “It’s pretty chilly out.”

“Yeah, it looks cool.” The salty spray whips my cheeks and tangles my hair, and I want more. More feeling, after being locked inside for so long.

“I’ll see if Mike has a wetsuit you can borrow.”

Half an hour later I’m at the top of deadmans rock with Jacob. Mike is at the bottom, safely out of the landing zone but close enough to grab me if there’s a problem.

“This is the best spot, it’s deep enough you won’t hit the bottom but it’ll put you close to Mike. You’re sure about this?”

I’m sure about this. 

“Land feet first. It’s not a far drop but it’ll still hurt if you land any other way.”

“Okay.” I step up to the edge. “Ready!”

“Ready!” Mike’s voice calls up from the water below.

And then I’m falling. And crashing through the surface of the water. And mike is grabbing me and pulling me to shore. Everyone is around me, helping me out of the borrowed wetsuit, wrapping towels around me, and shepherding me to the fire. A beer is shoved into my shaking hands and I drink, but not enough to dull the hundreds of sensations on my skin, more than I’ve ever felt. 

I feel everything. I feel free.


	4. Chapter 4

One year later…..

I sit in the admissions office at Forks Community College, holding the folder with my GED certificate. It’s been four months since I got it, most of which I spent working and going to Seattle to see Mom on my days off. Eventually Dad had convinced me to enroll in college ‘just fill out the fafsa. If it isn’t enough we’ll figure something out. You can’t work at a gas station forever’. 

“Isabelle Swan.” The admissions advisor calls me into her office. After we get the usual things squared away, we get down to deciding my classes. “You’ll need to take a freshman writing class, and a math. What are you interested in majoring in?”

“I don’t know.” I honestly hadn’t though about that at all. I don’t have a favorite high school class, a favorite museum or aquarium to go to, any significant activities I’ve voluntarily participated in for the past few years, except for going to the library. “I like libraries I guess.”

“Well a masters in library science can be added to anything. I worked in libraries for a long time before I came here. We have an archivist program here that links up nicely with University of Washington. I could put you in our introductory class for that. I’m actually teaching that this semester.”

“Yeah, that would be great.”

“So one more class to be full time. What do you think? You could get your science requirement out of the way, or take a history or literature class.”

I’m about to pick history when I hear a voice behind me. 

“Pick science, U of W will definitely take those credits. Credits in your major they get picky about, unless it’s specifically the archivist program.”

I turn around and freeze. Dark hair, thin, strong jaw, light eyes. Not blue, like I’d thought, but a light brown. The woman from the photo, taken in 1924.

“Hi Alice, have you met Bella? She’s thinking of going to library school. Bella, this is my niece Alice, she’s staying with me while she takes a break from U of W.”

“A new convert, you must be ecstatic, Esme.” Alice sits on the corner of Esme’s desk. “I’m a frequent flyer in admissions offices, I know my way around. Take biology, we can suffer together.” She winks.


	5. Chapter 5

I try and succeed in not dwelling on Alice Cullen and her similarity to the girl in the photo during the two weeks until the semester starts. I don’t see her in the first two bio lectures and I begin to wonder if she dropped the class, but when I walk into Thursday morning lab there she is, waving me over to her lab bench. 

“Hey, how are your classes so far?”

“They’re okay. How are yours?”

“They’re alright.”

The class starts, and thankfully there’s no going around and saying three things about yourself, like my other classes had. We get right to the point, which is practicing basic lab skills.

Things are going great, until someone drops a Bunsen burner. I’m at our lab bench, Alice is over at the professor’s desk asking for another roll of paper towels, and over by the chemical hood someone yelps, and I see flames licking the hem of their pants. Then everything goes dark.

Smoke fills my lungs and I feel the world spinning, my head light from oxygen deprivation. I feel my body plunging towards the floor, but cold arms catch me.

I’m feeling my way out of my room and down the hallway, holding my phone as a flashlight. It’s light in the house, though. A red light. I open my mouth to cry out, but the only thing that comes out is smoke. I see the stairs, but turn back, I need to go back.

A cold hand is holding mine tight, and I see the sky, gray with rain. I gasp, trying to cough the smoke out of my lungs. I’m cold and wet, lying with my head in Alice’s lap. A paramedic is standing next to us. I hear her talking, but it sounds far away. I manage to turn my head a little bit, and see a cop car pull up. Charlie jumps out, and I can finally hear again.

“What happened?”

“There was a fire in the classroom, she collapsed.”

“Was she burned?”

“No, she wasn’t anywhere near the fire.” I hear Alice explain what happened to Dad, and coincidentally me. “Someone was holding a burning Bunsen burner and dropped it, it caught their clothes on fire. They got pushed into the emergency shower before they were burned, and then we all evacuated. Bella collapsed when the fire started and was hyperventilating.”

“Is this your daughter, sir? Does she have any history of panic attacks, asthma, anything that could have caused this?” A paramedic pries Alice’s hand off mine and moves me onto a stretcher.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.” Charlie answers.

“But you’re her father?”

“Yes, I am. Give me a moment, I’ll be riding with her.” Charlie disappears, and someone covers me with a blanket and puts and puts an oxygen mask on my face.

I go through a dozen tests at the hospital, and they all come back normal.

“How can someone be semiconscious and have difficulty breathing for several minutes but have nothing physically wrong with her?” Charlie asks Carlisle.

“Stress and panic can impact people in dramatic ways, especially when they’ve gone through an even at traumatic as the house fire Bella was in. Bella, have you reacted this way to any other fires?”

“No. I get a little nervous sometimes but nothing like that.” But every fire I’ve been exposed to since then has been a stove or bonfire or candle. Something expected and in its correct place. “I guess it’s the first time I’ve been around a fire related accident since then.”

“Do you want me to write you a note that exempts you from class activities where open flame is used?” My first instinct is to refuse Carlisle’s offer, but what if seeing Bunsen burners sets me off from now on? “You don’t have to use it, but it’ll give you the option.”

“Yeah, okay.” Carlisle writes the note and has it faxed to the school, and I’m finally allowed to leave.

Back at home I curl up in bed and go online. A video of the incident is the first thing I see. The kid is holding a lit Bunsen burner, waving it around. I hear the teacher yell at him and he jumps, dropping the burner. It swings into his leg, lighting his pants on fire. Another student pushes him into the safety shower and pulls the bar, and the fire is out as soon as it’s started. The fire alarm goes off and the video becomes shaky and then goes dark as its owner leaves.

The second time I watch it I realize that I’m in the background. As soon as I see the fire my knees buckle, and I collapse, my face making a beeline for the corner of the lab bench. But Alice appears beside me and catches me, lifting me effortlessly and carrying me out of the room. 

But Alice was on the other side of the room when that happened.

I watch another few videos, and none of them have both me and Alice in the from, but in the ones with Alice and the professor, first she’s standing there and then she isn’t, and in the ones with me she materializes to catch me.

“Hey Bella, do you need anything?” I hear Dad on the stairs.

“I’m okay. I think I just need to sleep it off.” I stick my phone under my pillow and close my eyes. Maybe the events of today will make more sense in the morning, but I doubt it. Something is definitely very strange about Alice, but for some reason I don’t mind. Sometimes a little bit of mystery is nice.


End file.
